The Hibernate team is pleased to announce today's release of Hibernate 4.3.0.Beta1 which targets the (still not finalized) JPA 2.1 specification which is part of the upcoming Java EE 7 platform. This is the first release targeting JPA 2.1 support. As mentioned, JPA 2.1 is not completely finalized so this support should be considered a preview. JPA 2.1 defines a number of enhancements. I won't go in depth in each of them here as I plan to follow up with separate in-depth blog posts for some of these features. However, the web abounds with good summaries of the new features; for example:

One feature that I did not see discussed much is the notion of entity graphs. This Beta1 release has very limited support for entity graphs. You can define entity graphs, but at the moment they are not taken into account while loading data. This will be the focus of Beta2.

4.3 continues building on the OSGi support begun with 4.2, and also contains many other improvements and fixes. For the full break down of changes, see the changelog.

As usual, the artifacts have been uploaded to the JBoss Nexus repository (which is synchronized to Maven Central regularly) and the release bundles have been uploaded to the Hibernate SourceForge in both ZIP and TGZ formats.